Fall 2004
In Their Own Words
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The First Oral
Historian
THE BEGINNING of oral history
as an academic movement is wrongly credited to Allan Nevins, who
founded Columbia University’s oral-history office in 1948.
Two years earlier, in 1946, a psychology professor from Chicago
named David Boder lugged 60 pounds of primitive recording equipment,
including 200 spools of carbon steel wire and an assortment of
converters and transformers, to postwar Europe to interview displaced
persons in France, Switzerland, Italy and Germany, many of whom
were survivors of Nazi concentration camps.
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Photograph courtesy of the Huntington Library,
San Marino, CA
James Mink '46,
M.A. '49 (standing),
director of UCLA's Oral History Program
from 1964-'72, in undated photograph
with Allan Nevins of Columbia University
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It was the first methodical application of
recording to oral history, and the idea was so new that Boder
had no name for it. When he returned with 109 recorded interviews
totaling 120 hours, he called his recordings “the world’s
first spoken literature.” Sadly for Boder — who borrowed
from his life insurance to finance the expedition and who suffered
a serious heart attack the week his first book of interviews was
published — the world did not take notice. The book quickly
went out of print. Boder’s health deteriorated, and his
doctor advised him to move to a warmer climate. In 1952, he retired
from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and became a research
associate in the psychology department at UCLA.
In welcoming Boder, UCLA shares with IIT the
distinction of having been the first to support a recorded oral-history
project. In many ways Boder’s project was the perfect application
of oral history. There were at the time few written descriptions
of daily life and events in the concentration camps. There were
as yet few diaries from the survivors, who had been free for only
a year and had spent much of that time recovering from starvation
and disease. There was not even a name for what would later be
called the Holocaust. Only Boder attempted to fill the postwar
void. His interviews are the only extensive testimonials collected
from survivors so soon after the war. As such, they are perhaps
the most important historical sources about the Holocaust.
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